Up close and personal

Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a writer who was barely a whisker past 25. And it leads one to wonder what further such...

Power to the people

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his critically acclaimed 1998 bestseller, King Leopold's Ghost, an astonishing...

Family values

Much has happened in the life of Jhumpa Lahiri since she was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, an exquisite collection of short stories whose central characters are Indian immigrants to America.In early 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias Bush, a journalist with Time magazine, in a traditional...

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes his stories in notebooks in longhand and hires a typist to...

Paul Theroux: A truthful traveler with a sense of discovery

Midway through our conversation about Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux reminds me that during the 15 years in which he wrote the 49 travel essays and articles collected here, he also wrote a major book on China (Riding the Iron Rooster), three additional travel books, a controversial memoir about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul (In Sir Vidia's...